Chief sports columnist and associate editor with The Age

Accompanied by a throaty roar, the ball goes up and the game begins. Immediately, the ball disappears into a vast crush, and is not seen again for some time. Massive corporate exertion countervails massive corporate exertion, and no one makes much progress for what seems like hours. Combatants emerge scratched and bruised, sometimes with broken bones, sometimes groggy as if concussed, and are revived and return to the fray. Periodically, someone spies an opening and makes a dash for it, but soon is caught. There is virtually no kicking.

Sound familiar? One of the rugby codes, perhaps? Gridiron? Latter-day AFL? But wait, there's more. On game day, houses and shops are boarded up. Scuffles break out regularly, between men more closely related than they are arbitrarily divided. It has been this way for centuries. So, some sort of soccer hybrid, surely?

But there is no ruling body. There are no rules, and no one to enforce them anyway, no coaches, nor any limit on players; typically, about 350 take part.

No one wears a uniform. No records are kept. There is no trophy other than the ball itself.

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Give up? Of course you do. This is ba', which is "ball" linguistically cut down. It is played every Christmas and New Year's Day, come rain, hail or sleet, in Kirkwall, capital of the Orkney Islands, a hardy land of farmers and fishermen, nearer to the Arctic circle than London. It has been played at least since the 1600s, probably since viking times. From outside St Magnus' cathedral, "doonies" try to push the ba' into the sea, "uppies" to what was once the town gate. Contests last as little as four minutes and as long as nine hours (there are only seven hours of daylight). Suffocation and broken ribs are commonplace, but - happily - there is only one recorded death, in 1903.

A colleague, formerly of Scotland, alerted me to ba' this week. When he arrived in Australia 15 years ago, the first game of AFL he saw reminded him of ba' in its apparently anarchic simplicity. He thought AFL was closer than soccer or rugby to football's roots. To follow the contemporary debate is to start to believe that there has been some sort of devolution, and AFL has again become ba'.

Bah! Games always in a state of tension between contest and spectacle. A degree of hypocrisy informs many contemplations about what matters most. When I lived in London years ago, Arsenal won lots of games 1-0 and arch-rival Tottenham Hotspurs lost lots of games 2-3, and I know which set of fans was happier. Nathan Buckley was honest enough this week to admit that as a coach he cared only about the result, not the aesthetics.

Besides, players always find a way. In AFL, it might be via Stevie J's sleight of hand. In ba', it might be up a jumper, down a cobblestoned side street and at least once across a tiled rooftop. Whichever route you block off, tactically or statutorily, players will find another.

To scatter the packs, AFL needs now only stricter policing of "in the back", as advocated by Ross Lyon. Duly, it needs fewer numbers. As it happens, Orcadians are starting to conclude the same about ba'.

Meantime, the AFL's mind was trained on other Celts, to wit the Irish and a revival of the moribund international rules series. A one-off match is set down for Perth in November. Desperate for gravitas, the AFL gave arch-enthusiast Eddie McGuire the grandiose title of chef de mission and announced that only all-Australians would be selected. This was doubly perverse. All-Australianism as a criteria means nothing, since they are playing another, confected code; the Australian footballer best suited might not even play AFL. And history suggests they will struggle for quorum, anyway, and will have to dragoon mere mortals.

The reality about international rules is that the Irish are doubtful, Australians indifferent and the players up only for away games, by and large. At best, it is junketeering, which at least does have a long tradition in AFL. At worst, it is another pitiful attempt to invest AFL with the sort of international stature it can never have. It is not coincidence that this is a World Cup year in soccer, and so certain to tease out imperial pretensions all round. Expect to hear from zealots on all sides a lot of shrill supremacism and spurious reasoning, as instructive as if to claim that The Night Watch is a better painting than the Mona Lisa because it is 40 times the size.

The best game in the world is the one you love best, and however many or few others with you. Ask William Thomson, a slightly built Orcadian teenager featured in a 2007 Washington Post story about the Kirkwall ba'. Pulled limply unconscious from the madding crowd, he awoke at length, asked his girlfriend what had happened, took a swig from a friend's flask of whisky and said: "I need this to get my nerves back." Then he plunged straight back in.